[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  He knocked at the thick, richly burnished door. Not the Cabinet Room, thank God. This would be private.

  “Don’t stand out in the cold, man. Come in, come in! I’ve been waiting for you!” Churchill’s voice, with its lisp and deep intonations, leapt out of the room, capturing his respect as it always had, tempting him—to what? to be Colonel T. E. Lawrence, instead of Aircraftsman Ross, or a nameless dead man? To have a future and deeds to do once again?

  Not even you, Mr. Prime Minister. Not this time.

  Churchill rose to greet him, cigar pumping up and down in his mouth. Lawrence straightened to attention. Involuntarily, he grinned. If England were a nation of shopkeepers, here was the bulldog set to guard them, bow-tied, bull-necked, bald head stubbornly lowered even as he welcomed Lawrence. Hard to believe that the P.M. was around fifteen years older than he; Lawrence felt older than God, and the mirrors downstairs had done nothing to dispel that feeling.

  “Come in and sit down, Lawrence. Have you eaten? Drink?” Churchill gestured invitingly at the tantalus. “Tea?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Nonsense.” Churchill poured him out a whiskey, which Lawrence allowed to sit on the polished table beside him. “You’re neither a young nor a well man. We’ll have none of these endurance tests of yours, man. Not when I need you…”

  There it was. The need. The hope that Lawrence could once again be the man of the hour—or the mountebank. The demand that he accept, do, achieve, when all he wanted, all he ever wanted, was simply to be left alone.

  No, that wasn’t true. Once, he had wanted to be knighted and a general by the time he was thirty. Once, he had wanted to lead a revolution that would restore self-respect to all the races of the East. He had dreamed of nothing less; but the kings and diplomats had put paid to that. He remembered them all, Balfour and Weizmann and Faisal and Churchill, struggling toward agreement, and failing, after all the blood, the sacrifices, his own loss of honor and faith. Now he wanted to be left alone. He felt his hands start to shake, and closed one around the whiskey glass to still it; he very well knew that the man sitting across from him would never let him be.

  “Is that why…?” Lawrence waved his other hand, encompassing the past five years of medical and psychiatric interventions, the support and the secrecy. “Is that why you had me saved?”

  “Dammit, Lawrence!” Ah, now the bullying would start. “I had you watched, of course. But I wasn’t, apparently, the only one. Mind you, I wouldn’t have tried to run you down. It was the damned Germans did that. And it wasn’t I that saved you, either.”

  Lawrence cocked his head as he stared up at the taller man.

  “You can thank Aaron Aaronsohn and his people that you’re alive. God knows, I’m grateful enough.”

  Lawrence’s glass crashed down on the table, almost spilling the amber whiskey. “Hell! He’s still alive? I’d have thought someone had put a bullet through his head by now.”

  “No such luck. At least, that’s your good luck.” Churchill grinned at him through a cigar stub. “He’d been living at Zichron Ya’akov. In ‘retirement,’ he called it; but how much can any of that set retire? When the War broke out, he came back to England via the Orkneys again, to help Weizmann and the others make Balfour’s life a misery.”

  “The others,” as Lawrence perfectly well knew, being the Zionists with whom Churchill had such staunch, inexplicable sympathy.

  “They say they’re fighting two wars. One against Jerry, and the other, as this Ben-Gurion—name used to be Green, but he changed it —calls it, against our White Paper. Aaronsohn joined up….”

  It rankled to owe his life to Aaron Aaronsohn and his lunatic cabal. He’d met the man in Cairo; the dislike had been instant and mutual. “Thinks very highly of himself,” he had heard Aaronsohn wrote of him. And when he’d spoken of the Jewish settlements in Palestine, Aaronsohn could only comment that he thought he was “attending a Prussian anti-Semitic lecture.” Impossible to get through to the man! There were others in that group, though: best not to think of the dead.

  But Churchill was watching him with that terrible shrewdness that Lawrence remembered.

  “What does Aaronsohn want of me?”

  “You? What he wants of everyone. A homeland for the Jews in Palestine. God knows, they need something. Weizmann’s got proof that Hitler’s rounding them up and exterminating them. Like the Armenians in the last war, but on a grander scale, damn the Nazis’ efficiency. Goebbels is in on it.”

  Lawrence grimaced. “I speak German, but I’m no assassin. Aaronsohn saved my life for no purpose.”

  “Not what he thinks. Nor what I think. I’ve always thought that some overpowering need would draw you from the modest path you chose to tread and set you once again in full action at the center of memorable events.”

  Now, that sounded like one of Churchill’s better speeches. Lawrence suppressed an urge to applaud that surely would have provoked one of the P.M.’s better rages.

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but no. All I want is to be left in peace. Left alone.”

  “Lawrence, in plain talk, we need you. England needs you. While you were … convalescing out at Clouds Hill, men have been dying in North Africa. Hitler’s got a general out there we don’t seem able to get the better of. Rommel. They don’t call him the Desert Fox for nothing.”

  Rommel. Papers and books had been full of the stories of the middle-aged Swabian general, no Prussian or Junker, but from a staunch middle-class family and loyal past death to his country. Rommel. Lawrence had found himself fascinated even by the name, which tolled like a bell, hailing him back from peace to the very plots and bustle that he feared.

  “No one knows the desert better than you, Lawrence. Or the way a desert fighter’s mind works. The Arabs have turned against us, by and large, but there’s the Berbers. We want you to go out and—”

  “And what?” Abruptly, Lawrence felt himself go pale with rage. “Be that clown in the pantos that they call ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ all white robes, headcloth, and bathos? Lead the Berbers as if they’re Arabs? Well, they’re not. They’re a different cat altogether out in Libya. It’s not as if they’re all wogs with funny-sounding names.”

  Churchill shook his head, grinning more openly, and with great satisfaction. “So you can still be baited, can you?

  “Berbers,” he went on, “or Ageyli, Harithi, or Howeitat, Lawrence; we need you. Talk to them. Lead them; back to us, if you can; away from the Eighth Army, if you can’t. And we need to pit you against Rommel before he launches his final attack on Tobruk.”

  “You expect me to assassinate him for you?” Lawrence raised an eyebrow. “By your good offices, I’ve been raised from the dead, so now you want me to work you a miracle and kill—”

  “I know. You’re no assassin. And his skill in the desert is uncanny. But if anyone can match him at that, it’s you. You’ll know how to intercept him. Kill him if you can. Or, if you’re feeling like a miracle, try to meet him.” Churchill paused and drew reflectively on his cigar, and Lawrence suppressed a perverse desire to cough. “Talk to him. Dear God, if you could turn him—”

  “Against Germany? That won’t happen.”

  “Not against Germany. Against Hitler. Promise him what you must. We can worry about payment later.”

  “I’ve heard,” Lawrence whispered, “they’re trying to build a Reich that will last a thousand years.”

  “It’s lasted too long already! Hell, give him Paree; what do I care, so long as he’s stopped. But dead is safer. In fact—” He broke off. “You’ll be briefed here and in Cairo.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “I haven’t got it in me.”

  Churchill smiled and bit down on his cigar. “I knew you’d say that.”

  “How if I say ‘no,’ too, while I’m being so predictable? Sir.”

  “You can’t, Lawrence,” Churchill told him. For the first time in their conversation, he looked away. If such a thing were possible, Lawrence
would have sworn he looked embarrassed and ashamed.

  “Why not?” asked Lawrence. “After all, I’m supposed to be dead, aren’t I? I’ve just come from seeing my own effigy in St. Paul’s. You must have had to close down the City for that memorial service.”

  “Not quite,” said Churchill. “Disinformation is an old game. Rommel wouldn’t be surprised if you turned up; half the fortune-tellers in Soho think that you’re not dead but ‘in another place.’ You know your Morte d’Arthur better than I do.”

  “It’s not going to happen.” Lawrence pressed his hand against the table. “I’m not going to appear melodramatically at the hour of Britain’s greatest need—”

  “Which this is.”

  “Let me join the service again. Let me repair engines. Anything but this.”

  “No.”

  “Then I cannot help you,” Lawrence told the Prime Minister. Resisting him was harder than Lawrence had believed possible.

  “I am sorry, Lawrence. You don’t have a choice.” Churchill reached for a folder among the heaps of folders, books, papers on his vast desk. “There. Read these. And you can’t know how I regret having to use them.”

  The letters all had dates from between 1931 and 1934. “John Bruce,” Lawrence muttered to himself. He felt himself flushing. For very shame, sweat poured down his sides … five nights running while he wrote of Deraa, he had had nightmares in which the Bey coughed and the whip furrowed his back, to be shaken awake by his bunkmates … he had persuaded the younger man to flog him, hoping to drive out, suppress I the darkness within him, to expiate the disastrous loss of integrity he’d suffered that night.

  He looked down, pretending to read the letters that, years ago, he had written, posing as his own uncle. “Does he take his whipping as something he has earned? Is he sorry after it?” He flipped over a page, turned to another letter at random, and the shameful words leapt out at him. “Unless he strips, the birch is quite ineffective….”

  “For God’s sake, Lawrence!” Across from him, Churchill exploded, his fist pounding on the desk. Despite the cigar, his mouth twisted in pain and disgust. “How could you do it, man? Why did you do it?”

  He could feel it coming, that horrible hooting laugh. In Damascus, it had earned him a slap across the mouth from a British officer who saw only a bloody-minded, hysterical wog. He forced himself to breathe deeply, to try to control himself.

  “The English vice, they call it,” Churchill commented. “The results of public school.”

  Easy enough for a Duke’s cousin, educated at Harrow, raised at Blenheim Palace, to say. Easy enough for him to shrug it off. But not for Lawrence. For Ned Lawrence and his queer brothers, a day school had been good enough; the closest they got to Blenheim—assuming they had saved the ready to buy sweets—was on Public Days. The P.M. could afford this aristocratic disgust.

  Lawrence looked up. Churchill’s contempt would be his punishment. But the man’s disgust was for the folder of letters, which Lawrence laid carefully aside. “If I had known, we could have helped you. You see what Dr. Jones is able to do—”

  “No one can help me,” he said.

  “Think yourself some sort of Knight Templar, do you, Lawrence? I’m telling you: you will go to North Africa, or so help me, I’ll publish those letters.”

  Lawrence choked down the laughter rising in his throat again and knew it for the onset of madness. The line is ‘publish and be damned,’ I believe, he thought. But could he force it out? What would those letters do to his eldest brother, a queer fish of a missionary, totally in his mother’s control? What about his mother, who’d lost two sons already and lived like an anchoress, to conceal her sin with the man who was not, had never been her husband? His youngest brother might understand. But what would it do to his family?

  Lawrence sighed. “Tell me what you need me to do,” he said. “Thank you, Lawrence. And please believe me. I am truly sorry. After your job is done, you shall have those … letters back. Please burn them. Then we will see what else can be done for you.”

  “There is one thing that I want,” said Lawrence. “Shall I have it?”

  “Name it.”

  “To be left alone!”

  “Agreed,” said Churchill with such despatch that Lawrence could not believe him. “I will have you briefed. You leave for Cairo as soon as we can assemble a convoy.”

  “Wait,” said Lawrence. A debt remained outstanding: the little matter of his pride as he had entered Number 10 and people had whispered his name. “I would like to thank Aaronsohn.”

  That would be a fitting punishment.

  “Jones said you’d probably say something like that. He and Weizmann are here,” said the P.M. He rang for his secretary. Colvin appeared, impervious and unspotted. Pray God he never violated his soul—or had to strip it bare—as Lawrence had done. But there was no way of passing that lesson on.

  “Show Colonel Lawrence into the Cabinet Room, and ask Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Aaronsohn to join him.”

  Lawrence rose, saluted as if he were still in the R.A.F., and marched out of the room, aware of Churchill’s eyes on his back. Outside waited at least two secretaries, one carrying a dispatch box, the other burdened with books and documents. Both leaned against the wall, looking more tired than the Prime Minister, who was at least forty years their senior.

  “That bastard,” he heard Churchill mutter in that bulldog rasp of his, all the throatier for the late hour and the many cigars. “That poor, damned bastard.”

  One hand on the polished conference table, Lawrence waited as if for an attack. His hand was trembling, he saw, and stifled a curse. Of all the times for his malaria to recur! Aaronsohn had saved his life, but nevertheless, he had enough pride left to want to face the man without fighting the sweats, the chills, and the shakes.

  Despite his dreams of unifying the races in Palestine, under the technical leadership of what he was awed enough to call the eternal miracle of Jewry, Lawrence had to admit that he had trouble with Jews. With Zionists, most of all. How did Churchill put up with the stiffnecked bastards? For example, there was the time when some great, redheaded farmer, seeing Lawrence in his robes and imagining him to be some poor, sullen Arab not quick enough to step out of his way, knocked him down. And then, there was the time that Weizmann met with Lawrence, Sykes himself, Balfour, and his dead prince Faisal—and argued them to a standstill.

  Aaronsohn, though, was a different breed. If Weizmann were a scientist with a cause, as much a catalyst as one of his own chemical reactions, Aaronsohn was, pure and simple, a zealot, and the leader of zealots. Their very name confirmed it, taken as it was from the lines of Samuel, condemning Saul for not having destroyed the Amalekites. Netzach Yisroel lo yishaker. The strength of Israel will not lie. Nor, for that matter, repent. Nor would Aaronsohn.

  Yet he had saved Lawrence, who wiped the sweat from his forehead and wished for quinine tablets. The door swung wide, and Weizmann entered first, Aaronsohn limping after him. He was still stocky, still reddened, unable even after a lifetime spent in Palestine to brown rather than to redden. He looked almost as Irish as Lawrence himself. Weizmann, bearing the dark complexion and intensity of his Russian blood, seemed far more recognizably Jewish.

  “It’s been a long time, Colonel.” For a moment, Weizmann hesitated.

  Lawrence moved forward. “They fixed me up,” he said. Reluctantly, he extended his hand. “Nothing will fall off.”

  Neither of the Zionists laughed, but eyed him with the intensity that he remembered. They stood until standing became awkward, and Lawrence remembered, belatedly, to gesture them to chairs. The silence grew, became demanding.

  “I have to thank you,” Lawrence said. “The Prime Minister says that you helped pull me out of that crash.”

  Weizmann was shaking his head. “Better let Aaron explain that.”

  The veteran leaned forward. “We had you followed, Lawrence,” he said. “Just as well, too. That was no crash, but a very well set up assassinat
ion attempt by the Germans. We’ve gotten used to such things in Eretz Yisroel.”

  Aaronsohn’s use of the Hebrew name that the Zionists used for their dreamed-of homeland was, of course, deliberate provocation. Lawrence let it pass. He remembered now; even as he slipped from consciousness, expecting never to wake, he had heard German.

  “A bullet or two drove them off, and I sent one of my people to fetch the police. Good thing we were on the spot; if the Germans hadn’t set you up, the way you rode that cycle of yours might have been the death of you.”

  Lawrence looked down. He had always pushed his luck with his cycles, had raced them against cars and planes, had usually won until this last time when he saw two boys on bicycles and made the deliberate decision to swerve abruptly, knowing that at his speed and with the van coming at him, this was one crash he could never walk away from. Did I truly want to die? Jones had croaked about that a good deal in the five painful years of reconstruction.

  “Germans,” he mused.

  “Apparently, Colonel,” Weizmann said, laying gentle stress on the title, “they believed that you meant what you said about being out of the picture, just as much as Churchill does—or as we do. So they planned to make sure of your death.

  “I take it,” Weizmann continued as Lawrence sat quietly, sure that he should not divulge Churchill’s plans, “that he’s sending you to North Africa. No doubt, you’ve been following Rommel’s victories there.”

  Lawrence shook his head gently. “Only a little. My reading has been … carefully supervised.”

  “You’re needed. If there’s anyone who can hunt the Desert Fox, it’s you.”

  “You’re needed for other things,” Aaronsohn said, lips twisting as if the words were sour. “Show him the pictures, Chaim.”

  So you need me, too? What for, I wonder.

  Weizmann reached into his briefcase, pulled out an envelope, and laid it gently on the table before Lawrence. “You said your reading was supervised. Then you don’t know what’s been going on. Look at these pictures!” The Russian chemist’s voice grew husky. “For God’s sake, look. They are killing us!”